Stratospheric O3 depletion, air quality, global warming - which one poses the most serious problem and why?

Question

Stratospheric O3 depletion, air quality, global warming - which one poses the most serious problem and why?

Answer 1

Greenies scammers are the biggest danger for humanity.

Answer 2

The air quality is far better now than it was in the 1960's, the Earth is starting to cool down, and since fluorocarbons were banned, the ozone hole is just getting better.

Life is good and the times are wonderful.

Answer 3

None of them. The biggest problem is overpopulation, which drives the rest of the problems.  It also drives a problem that is bigger than all those--the world's increasing demand for energy and our rapidly dwindling supply of it. Energy supplies will be the key over the next 50 years.

Answer 4

Global warming, hands down.

The reason is that we already have effective strategies in place, and are reducing the other two issues.

We've made minor changes in the area of global warming, which have slightly reduced the rate of increase, but we have a LONG way to go.

Answer 5

I disagree with Richard B. There is much Ozone and CO that is man-made and it is due to a worldwide air quality problem. If we look at the presence of carbon monoxide and ozone as measured by the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES)—launched on July 15, 2004, on the EOS satellite Aura—we see that these gases appear and disappear over time. The images from Aura show that carbon monoxide is abundant in our atmosphere, and yes, that is the carbon monoxide that kills people when they don’t ventilate their heaters properly. It is created by incomplete burning of vegetation. People in the tropics commonly burn grasslands in the dry season before summer rains begin, to improve forage.

Ozone is created in this process as well, both by burning and by chemical processes in polluted air. A year of TES data shows that Africa and South America are the major sources of these gases during the burning season. Atmospheric processes then pump ozone and carbon monoxide from these regions into the sky over the southern Atlantic Ocean. There is also some carbon monoxide and ozone in the Northern Hemisphere, due in most part to low pollution emission standards in China and Eastern Europe. As the year progresses toward winter, higher and higher levels of carbon monoxide and ozone appear in the high northern latitudes, because people heat their homes with fossil fuels, primarily coal. Incidentally, while big SUVs contribute some greenhouse gases, most are emitted through home heating.

The disappearance of ozone begins with the release of chlorine from chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, in the presence of sunlight. (That chlorine, by the way, comes from the CFCs that we all used back in the 1950s–1970s. While generally extremely long-lived, CFCs are broken down by intense ultraviolet light in the stratosphere. Many CFCs are still floating around up there, and they continue to be released today from countries where they are not banned.) Chlorine is anathema as far as ozone goes: a single atom of it destroys ozone and survives, going on to destroy many thousands more ozone molecules before being neutralized by some other reaction. The chlorine released from CFCs becomes destructive only after it is activated; this activation begins in May on the surfaces of nitric acid particles that condense to form clouds in the very cold, early winter stratosphere over Antarctica. Early May is also polar night at the South Pole, so full-time darkness reigns. The reaction of activated chlorine with ozone begins only when sunlight returns to the Antarctic in July. These reactions create chlorine monoxide, which is the smoking gun signifying the destruction of ozone. So the ozone is fairly safe in mid-May, in the absence of sunlight, especially as it is being replenished in the lower stratosphere by descending winds from the upper stratosphere, where abundances are higher.

But as the sun returns in July, destruction eventually

overcomes replenishment, and we start to see the ozone values in the lower stratosphere decline. The ozone loss accelerates as winter progresses, sunlight increases daily, and more and more activated chlorine reacts with ozone. By mid-September, chlorine monoxide is at its highest, and a region the size of the entire Antarctic continent is almost completely depleted of ozone. This is what we call the “ozone hole.” (By the end of September, the Antarctic air is too warm to host the icy clouds, and chlorine monoxide disappears.)

Fortunately for us, the deepening and widening ozone hole is kept confined to a region over the Antarctic by the “polar vortex,” a region of air isolated from its surroundings by strong encircling winds. Until late spring, that is, when the vortex begins to break up, and chunks of the hole split off and float away to places like southern South America, New Zealand, and Australia. New Zealanders, as a result, are very concerned about their increased skin cancer risk. By late December, the ozone hole has vanished, and everything gets reset until the austral fall, when in the darkness of polar night the temperatures drop again, another winter polar vortex spins up, and the whole process starts all over again.

Answer 6

of the three, air quality is the worst problem since it has the largest effect on life. the ozone depletion was a red herring like global warming is. people would point to a hole in the ozone layer, and then using junk science claim that we are killing the ozone layer. the hole that was pointed to is over the south pole, is a natural hole that comes and goes on a regular basis. the sun destroys and creates ozone on a daily basis, thus the ozone layer was never in danger of anything that man has done. air pollution on the other hand IS something man can control, and has made great strides in controlling air pollution.